Place, Responsibility, and Sanding on the TEDxAsheville Stage with Sekou Coleman

Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I’m your host, James Navé, and today my guest is Sekou Coleman. Sekou Coleman is a community historian, cultural organizer, and one of the speakers appearing on the TEDxAsheville stage in March 2026. For more than three decades, he has worked alongside communities to protect memory, strengthen local decision-making, and resist the quiet erasure that often accompanies development and policy change.In this conversation, we explore Asheville’s Southside—a historically Black neighborhood shaped by resilience, loss, and renewal—and the invisible victories that happen when communities choose repair over extraction. Sekou reflects on Urban Renewal, generational disruption, and what it means to speak with a community rather than for it.At the heart of this conversation is a question that reaches far beyond Asheville: What kind of legacy do you want to be attached to?This episode is about place, authority, and attention—about seeing what we’ve been driving past, and about how telling the right story at the right moment can quietly change everything.